The prior art is rife with attempts to enhance the shopping experience between a shopper and a store. These attempts are oriented to move a shopper through a store faster, help a shopper find items on a store shelf, keep track of the shopper moving throughout the store and aid a shopper to check-out quickly. Unfortunately, many of these attempts have been highly complex, labor intensive, extremely expensive to implement, maintain and/or replace. Often, these attempts have negatively impacted store profits, caused higher store costs passed onto the shopper and have been deemed unreliable and undependable in the day-to-day operation of a store's fast-paced environment.
Enhancing a shopper's experience in a store and establishing faster methods of check-out are laudable goals. However, the high cost of such systems and their impact on a store's bottom line has been greatly overlooked by the prior art. In the grocery industry, in particular, profit margins are thin (e.g., often no more than 2% of total store sales) and are highly susceptible to fluctuations in rising fuel costs, commodity costs, labor costs and many other costs related to daily operations. Such fluctuations can raise incremental store costs in expected and unexpected ways.
As a result of its thin profit margins, the grocery industry, by and large, continually works to contain its operational costs; i.e., the daily costs to keep open and maintain a store. Controlling operational costs for a grocery store is important and bears directly upon either the size of its profit margin, increased costs to its customers or both. The prior art scantily, if at all, addresses this issue.
For example, Coveley (U.S. Pat. No. 6,725,206) describes the combination of a shopping cart that weighs items placed therein and a handheld device to which the shopping cart communicates this weight information. Coveley does not provide an in-store wireless network. Instead, Coveley conducts financial transactions wirelessly from the handheld device out beyond the physical limits of the store. Like most executions of this type, Coveley's cashier-less shopping store requires a handheld device of vast complexity, cost and sophistication to perform complex technological functions. Coveley's handheld device is a highly expensive solution which costs are borne by the store itself and potentially passed onto store shoppers. While potentially convenient to a shopper, such an execution as Coveley's adds significant capital costs, replacement costs, maintenance costs, increased insurance costs, and others to the daily operational costs of a store.
Schkolnick, et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 6,032,127) provides an “intelligent” shopping cart that uses radio frequency (RF) fields created within the shopping cart that can identify items placed within the shopping cart by the RF tags of items so equipped. Like Coveley, Schkolnick provides a highly sophisticated, complex and expensive way to identify and catalog items placed within a shopping cart. The shopping cart is equipped with a cart computer, computer programs and cart memory. These additions to a shopping cart can cause the cost per cart to rise dramatically in comparison to shopping carts not so equipped. As a result replacement costs and maintenance costs may sky rocket and directly, negatively impact a store's profit margin.
Yoshihisa (JP Application No. 01130949) provides a process that allows a customer to register articles by a scanner fixed to a cart, transmit the registered contents to a host computer through radio waves and then transmit information about the shopping cart's contents to a cash register. The shopping cart comprises a scale that weighs items placed therein. The shopping cart records and retains the weight information until check-out when it is compared to an expected weight based upon the items scanned into the cart.
As has been noted hereinabove, a myriad of attempts to create a shopper-friendly, enjoyable and speedy shopping experience have been tried. However, a cursory review of one's favorite grocery store readily affirms that few, if any, of these attempts have received any large scale use or application in the United States or worldwide. The impediments to the implementation of these attempts are several. First, per unit cost of each handheld device of the prior art are quite high, ranging in price from between several hundred dollars to as high as one-thousand dollars or more. Such costs bear directly upon a store's profitability, its prices to customers or both. As mentioned, this is due to the highly sophisticated components, software, and programming expertise used to construct these handheld devices. Such high-cost devices are also highly susceptible to theft and therefore high insurance and replacement costs can ensue.
In addition, at several hundred dollars or more per unit and per store deployment of the handheld devices ranging from several dozen to several hundred, initial entry costs for use of the handheld devices can be staggering. These initial costs can either reduce a store's profit margins, increase store costs directly to a shopper (i.e., through cost pass-through) or both.
Another impediment to implementation is the replacement costs of the handheld devices due to either theft or damage. Initial costs notwithstanding, replacement costs for the use of the handheld devices described herein can be as costly over time as their initial introduction by the hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands across a retail chain and in particular a grocery store chain. Additionally, given the complexity of the handheld devices described hereinabove, technical support for the handheld devices and technologically complex shopping carts would be required and therefore could add significantly to overall store operational costs.
Similarly, the shopping carts described in the prior art and hereinabove can be cost prohibitive too. They are, as has been noted herein concerning the handheld devices, highly complex, comprise expensive components, have high replacement costs and can be expensive to use and maintain. Given that a certain percentage of shopping carts from nearly every store disappears each year without recovery, it is a virtual guarantee that higher replacement costs per store for such shopping carts will serve to either erode a store's profits or erode that store's customer base as higher grocery prices are passed onto its customers.
What is therefore needed is a low cost, highly effective, highly reliable shopping system for a shopper that serves to enhance, simplify and expedite a shopper's experience with very little, if any, cost pass-through by higher store prices due to expensive end-user components and very little, if any, negative impact to a store's profit margin. This has been achieved through one or more of the embodiments enclosed hereinbelow and will now be explained with greater detail and particularity.